It is a challenging thing to look in a mirror and witness yourself aging and that is something that is difficult to say out loud. I am in my early 50's now but my inner self still feels much like she did in her 30's; just with a touch more wisdom and much better decision making. Physically, I feel better than I did in my 40's thanks to some intentional lifestyle changes yet quite often, there are days when my inner self feels surprised by the woman looking back at her in the mirror. It's almost like looking at someone who seems vaguely familiar but you can't quite place them and so the whole interaction becomes slightly awkward and feels a tinge uncomfortable.
A mirror reflects time, not internal continuity. What I am actually experiencing is a mismatch in evidence between my internal and external self. It's a weird experience and one that goes largely unnamed. For years I wore with pride the accolades I received for "looking so young" while being the mother of a now 31 year old man. Never mind that I became his mother at the tender age of 20, I still enjoyed the praise of the external audience. That praise brings us to the bigger issue that lies here.
The mirror also reflects...no, it actually confronts cultural messaging. In our world, aging is not treated like a natural, biological process. It is framed as a social failure. We have this absurd goal of looking "untouched" by time. Remaining forever young. Intellectually I reject this. I can call this out as absurd and not biologically possible at all. However, the reality is that my nervous system has absorbed decades of this conditioning. I know the truth, but I hear and feel the voice and stare of cultural messaging. I anticipate the judgment of that external audience.
You see, our internal voice and state cannot be heard or measured by anyone except ourself. Human nature shows us that we tend to dismiss or reject what we feel excluded from. Most people prefer to stand in a unified collective of shared opinion and thus systems and messaging will always win. Shallow systems dismiss what deeper systems value. They are two separate viewpoints from two separate perspectives. One looks at the surface only and one looks with curiosity for what is below. It is what it is. But it is my responsibility to protect my inner awareness and knowledge from being negotiated with the rules and ideas of someone else. In this way, the mirror is not the enemy. The imagined cultural gatekeepers are.
If I'm not careful I could find myself trying to outrun or survive a dynamic that I never created nor is mine to fix. We each have the agency to feel, believe and follow whatever we feel aligned with. We need to be reminded that cultural messages are simply thoughts and ideas and we have the ability to choose which pieces we adopt as our own. My authority over my life is what anchors me to me and I don't need an audience to approve that.
Lately, I have been encountering people who openly assume and directly ask if I am older than I am. My initial reaction is typically a smile and gentle correction but I have actually had the response to that be an insistence that I must be at least 55 or older. I can't help but feel a sting when this happens and that's ok. I'm human and also not 55+ (yet). I've been sitting with the sting and realized that the sting is nothing more than another indicator of misalignment with how I internally view myself and my actual chronological age. It is good that I experience and feel myself as younger. What someone else observes is actually irrelevant to that internal truth. Alignment is always knocking from the inside; it's just that the world around us is so loud with so many people offering up opinions and ideas that they insist are accurate that it often becomes hard to hear it.
My internal voice does not equate with the value's of society or a particular collective. It cannot be heard by anyone but myself and thus cannot be measured by anyone else. Human nature shows us that people tend to dismiss or reject what they feel excluded from. People prefer to stand under unified collectives that are in agreement with what they already think and believe. This is how systems and messaging become so powerful. Culturally, we equate aging to irrelevance and dismissal. Especially for women. It should go without saying that dismissal by another person or collective is not actually a rejection of you or your value. It is an honest revealing of their inner framework and inner framework is literally the structure upon which their proverbial "home" is built. The good news is that we don't have to live inside a home of someone else's making. We can build our own.
And building my own is exactly what I am doing in this season of life. My internal struggle, quiet rebellion or protest ~ whatever you want to call it is a signal of my integrity staying intact. Integrity and oweness to myself. Each little sting I feel is actually building scar tissue over the wounds of acceptance our culture has created. As I sit quietly with it, I dismiss its power over my life. I'm no longer looking in the mirror at an aged version of a girl I once knew. I am witnessing transformation. I am looking upon evidence of endurance, self knowledge and survival in a world that often self destructs. I see a woman who is no longer negotiating her self worth with someone else's ideas of what a life should look like. I am unbinding beliefs that never served me; they just tried to keep me imprisoned behind invisible bars I once struggled to name.
Today, I see them for what they are: conditioning, trauma & inherited narratives. Once something is "seen" it loses its power to quietly define you. It can't live here anymore. I am living in alignment with me which means I am living from choice and not compulsion. That is freedom. Real freedom is not loud or obvious. It is operating from sufficiency and not scarcity. And that? Well, my friend, that feels a lot like what love is supposed to be.
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